REVIEW 4 major objections 7 minor 36 references
Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Circulant and Diagonal Vectors
T0 review · 4 major / 7 minor · reviewed 2026-08-16 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Fine-tuning with circulant and diagonal vectors matches existing adapters while sharply reducing FLOPs and trainable parameters.
desk verdict A solid incremental PEFT method with correct math and real FLOP savings, but the fixed m=2 factorization is asserted rather than validated. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The central identity is that a circulant matrix-vector product equals $\mathrm{IFFT}(\mathrm{FFT}(\mathbf{c}) \odot \mathrm{FFT}(\mathbf{x}))$, where $\mathbf{c}$ is the vector defining the circulant matrix. CDVFT iterates this identity with diagonal (elementwise) multiplications, so the whole adapter is a sequence of vector operations; the backward pass reuses forward FFTs via conjugation, $\mathrm{IFFT}(\mathrm{conj}(\mathbf{F}) \odot \mathbf{F}_y)$, avoiding extra transforms. The block-partition scheme extends the square-only circulant construction to rectangular weight matrices by splitting them into square circulant blocks.
What would settle it
Fine-tune RoBERTa-base on the six GLUE tasks with CDVFT at $m=2$ and at $m=3$ (adding one more circulant-diagonal pair), holding all other settings fixed; if $m=3$ improves any task's score by more than the reported standard deviation, the sufficiency claim for $m=2$ is refuted on that task.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
Building on the theorem that any complex square matrix can be expressed as a product of at most $2n-1$ interleaved circulant and diagonal matrices, CDVFT factorizes the weight update $\Delta W$ as $\mathrm{diag}(\mathbf{a}_{2m-1}) \times \mathrm{circ}(\mathbf{a}_{2m-2}) \times \cdots \times \mathrm{diag}(\mathbf{a}_1)$. In practice it sets $m=2$, i.e., two diagonal matrices and one circulant matrix, and computes the adapter output by an alternating chain of elementwise multiplications and 1D FFTs, so the quadratic cost of constructing and applying $\Delta W$ becomes loglinear in the dimension. For non-square weights, the circulant factor is partitioned into square blocks, each block itself a circulant matrix. The paper claims this yields accuracy comparable to LoRA and FourierFT while using far fewer trainable parameters than LoRA and far fewer FLOPs than FourierFT across natural language understanding, image classification, and instruction tuning.
Load-bearing premise
The method's accuracy rests on the untested assumption that a single circulant matrix sandwiched between two diagonal matrices ($m=2$) is expressive enough to capture the useful weight update on any given task, with no ablation over $m$ provided.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Fine-tuning memory and compute scale with vector length $d$ and factor count $m$ rather than with the full weight-matrix dimension, making adaptation of larger models more feasible on limited hardware.
- The $m=2$ configuration (diagonal-circulant-diagonal) is claimed to be sufficient for task-level accuracy on the evaluated benchmarks, so practitioners can use CDVFT without tuning the number of factors.
- Block partitioning with larger block sizes $p$ reduces parameter count and FLOPs, giving a direct knob to trade cost against accuracy on non-square layers such as those in LLaMA2-7B.
- Because the trained factors are vectors, the final update $\Delta W$ can be reconstructed and merged into the frozen weights after training, so inference latency is unchanged.
Reading between the lines
- The factorization family suggests a natural expressivity-cost ladder: increasing $m$ from 1 to larger values approaches arbitrary dense updates, so CDVFT could serve as a bridge between extremely cheap structured adapters and full fine-tuning.
- One testable extension is to apply CDVFT to other structured-matrix problems, such as compressing attention projections or convolution kernels, where circulant structure is a known inductive bias.
- The paper's observation that larger block sizes sometimes do not hurt accuracy hints that the circulant-diagonal structure itself may act as a regularizer; a systematic study of this effect would separate regularization from capacity in the accuracy numbers.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes CDVFT, a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method that represents the weight update ΔW as a product of interleaved diagonal and circulant matrices and computes the adapter output with 1D FFT operations, without materializing ΔW during training. Non-square weight matrices are handled by partitioning the circulant factor into blocks. The method is evaluated on GLUE with RoBERTa-base, on CIFAR-100 and RESISC45 with ViT-base, and on Alpaca and GSM8K with LLaMA2-7B, using m=2 in all experiments. The reported results show accuracy comparable to LoRA and FourierFT while using fewer trainable parameters than LoRA and substantially fewer FLOPs than FourierFT.
Significance. If the fixed m=2 factorization is indeed sufficient across tasks, CDVFT is a useful contribution to the PEFT efficiency frontier: it achieves parameter counts close to FourierFT with much lower FLOPs and no accuracy loss on the tested benchmarks. The paper's strengths include the clean 1D-FFT formulation, the backward-pass rules in Eq. (11) that reuse forward FFTs via conjugation, and the breadth of evaluation across NLU, vision, and instruction tuning. The main open question is whether the small number of factors is an expressivity bottleneck; the paper currently provides no systematic evidence on this point, which is load-bearing for the central efficiency claim.
major comments (4)
- [Section 3.1/Eq. (3) and Section 4.1] The efficiency claims in the abstract and Fig. 2 rest on fixing m=2, but the paper provides no ablation over m or over the block size p. The parameter count is (2m−1)d per square adapter and the FLOPs scale as O(m d log d), so the advertised 55K-parameter/27M-FLOP operating point is only meaningful if m=2 is expressive enough on all tested tasks. The cited Huhtanen–Perämäki theorem guarantees factorization with up to 2n−1 factors, not that two diagonal and one circulant factor suffice, and no approximation-error bound for m=2 is given. Please add an ablation on at least one GLUE task and one image task sweeping m (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4) together with the corresponding parameter and FLOP counts, and sweep p in the same ablation. Without this, the Pareto comparison to LoRA/FourierFT is incomplete.
- [Fig. 1 caption and Section 4.1] The caption states 'In practice, we find m = 1 (no loops required) can effectively fine-tune the model, where there are two diagonal matrices and one circulant matrix.' This contradicts Section 4.1, which sets 'a total of 3 factor matrices, i.e., m = 2,' and also contradicts Eq. (3), under which m=1 gives a single diagonal factor and no circulant matrix. The definition of m must be made consistent across the figure, the equations, and the experimental sections.
- [Section 3.4 and Figs. 2/Table 3] The FLOPs values that support the '51.81× FLOPs reduction' claim are presented without a counting convention. It is not specified whether the numbers are per sample, per optimizer step, forward-only or forward+backward, or whether FFT operations are counted as complex or real operations. Please provide the exact formulas used for each method so the headline complexity comparison can be reproduced.
- [Section 2 and Section 3.1] The factorization theorem of Huhtanen and Perämäki is quoted for complex matrices, while CDVFT trains real diagonal and circulant vectors. The paper does not explain whether the same 2n−1 factor bound holds over the reals or whether the theorem's factors can be chosen real for a real target matrix. Please either supply a real-matrix statement of the theorem or weaken the claim that the construction 'theoretically can approximate any dense matrix.'
minor comments (7)
- [Section 4.3, Implementation details] The sentence 'we apply block circulant fine-tuning on query and value weight matrices inside the attention layer of two RoBERTa models and the LLaMA2-7B model fine-tuned on the alpaca dataset' appears to be a copy-paste error; the experiments use one RoBERTa model for GLUE and LLaMA2-7B for instruction tuning, and the sentence should be rewritten.
- [Eq. (2)] Eq. (2) defines the circulant matrix as circ(a_{2j}) while the surrounding text and Eq. (3) use c_{2j} for circulant vectors; please unify the notation.
- [Section 4.2] The text says 'we fine-tune on several challenging image classification datasets, only two are listed here for observation,' but Table 2 reports only two datasets; if additional datasets were evaluated, they should be reported, and if not, the sentence should be corrected.
- [Table 3 caption] The phrase 'LaMDA++ is lack of rank information' should be 'LaMDA++ lacks rank information.'
- [Section 3.4] The sentence containing '(Priority is primarily given to cases where the weight matrix is square.)' is incomplete or misplaced; please clean up this sentence.
- [Section 3.3] The block-partition description says matrices are 'automatically padded through replication'; please specify exactly how rows and columns are padded when d1 or d2 is not divisible by p, and whether padding affects the eventual merge into the pretrained weights.
- [Introduction] There is a typo on the first page: 'fullfill' should be 'fulfill.'
Circularity Check
No circularity: CDVFT's efficiency claims are benchmarked externally and the factorization theorem is cited from independent prior work.
full rationale
The central efficiency claims (55K trainable parameters, 27M FLOPs on RoBERTa-base, 51.81x FLOP reduction vs FourierFT, 5.33x parameter savings vs LoRA) are not derived from fitted inputs. The parameter count (2m-1)dL_t and the O(md log d) FLOP estimate follow analytically from the definition of the interleaved diagonal/circulant factors in Section 3.4, and the performance numbers are measured on public benchmarks (GLUE, CIFAR-100, RESISC45, Alpaca, GSM8K) against external baselines (LoRA, VeRA, FourierFT, LaMDA). The representability guarantee is cited from Huhtanen and Peramaki (2015), an external mathematical theorem, and is not used to fit any parameter; the paper instead fixes m=2 as an empirical design choice. The block-circulant partitioning cites Ding et al. (2017), which shares an author with the present paper, but the partition is described self-containedly in Eq. (12) and serves as an implementation component, not as evidence for a prediction, so this self-citation is not load-bearing. The only substantive weakness is that m=2 is asserted without an ablation or approximation bound, and Fig. 1's caption says m=1 while Section 4.1 says m=2; this is an unsupported expressivity assumption and an internal inconsistency, but not a circular reduction, because the method's claims stand or fall on the public benchmark numbers rather than on the assumption itself.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (3)
- m (number of diagonal matrices, total factors 2m-1) =
2 for all experiments
- p (block size for circulant partition) =
768 for RoBERTa/ViT, 4096 or 2048 for LLaMA2-7B
- alpha (scaling hyperparameter) =
not specified in the paper
assumptions (5)
- standard math Any complex n x n matrix can be factorized into a product of interleaved diagonal and circulant matrices with at most 2n-1 factors (Huhtanen and Peramaki 2015).
- domain assumption A single circulant matrix between two diagonal matrices (m=2) is sufficient to approximate fine-tuning updates.
- standard math FFT of a shifted real vector is the conjugate of the FFT of the original vector.
- domain assumption Block-circulant partitioning with padding by replication preserves accuracy for non-square weight matrices.
- domain assumption Fine-tuning only query and value projection matrices is sufficient for the evaluated tasks.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Circulant and Diagonal Vectors." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/F4PRYRSO
@misc{pith2026250500580,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning with Circulant and Diagonal Vectors},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/F4PRYRSO}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.00580}
}
read the original abstract
Foundation models have achieved tremendous success in different domains. However, their huge computation and storage complexity make these models difficult to fine-tune and also less applicable in practice. Recent study shows training in Fourier domain can be an effective fine-tuning method in terms of both model performance and number of training parameters. In this work, we propose to further reduce the complexity by the factorization through the product of interleaved circulant and diagonal matrices. In addition, we address the case of non-square fine-tuning weights by partitioning the circulant matrix into blocks. Our method avoids the construction of weight change matrix and utilizes 1D fast Fourier transform (FFT) instead of 2D FFT. Experimental results show that our method achieves similar or better performance across various tasks with much less floating-point operations (FLOPs) and the number of trainable parameters.
Figures
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